Is truth history?(case studies on Aboriginal Australians)

"TRUTHS ALL OVER the place", was the incisive title of Gregory Haines review of Bain Attwood's Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Quadrant, January-February). "Curiously, for a book that claims to be telling the truth about Aboriginal history," notes Haines, "it does not really engage with what historical truth may be." Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History presents Attwood's view of what truth may not be: correspondence to the immutable facts! But curiously it does not present his view of what truth is. If readers believe that a definition is unnecessary, since everybody knows what truth is, they may be less sure of this by the time they finish reading Attwood's book. Whatever his unstated definition of truth may be, consistency is unlikely to be one of its essential characteristics.

The publication of Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History launched the 2005 winter offensive on the new humanities front of the Aboriginal history war. Attwood had not participated in the Whitewash offensive of 2003, so he could distance himself from some of its more conspicuous failures, while adapting some of its tactics and recycling its used shot. Attwood competes with the old guard for leadership of the war against the academics' common enemy. His primary aim, however, is to carve out ideological territory for a new breed of historians. He craves scholastic living space where they will be free to develop their new humanities arts and create new types of history of, by, and for Australia.

The old guard cannot have been happy about Attwood taking the war to the new humanities front. A two-front war divides the common effort, and a division in the ranks can be exploited by the enemy. The division opened wide enough to be noticed on June 11, 2004, when Attwood's review of Henry Reynolds' newly revised edition of The Law of the Land was published in the Australian Financial Review. It was an edited version of an academic paper published a month earlier by History Compass. The bell tolled when critics noticed Attwood's analysis of Henry Reynolds' role in the invention of the doctrine that the British declared Australia terra nullius.

THE FICTION OF A FICTION

TERRA NULLIUS, we had been taught, was a fiction invented by the British to justify their Australian land-grab. But in fact it was what we had been taught that was the fiction, invented by academics to pave the way for the High Court's Mabo decision. This fiction-of-a-fiction was blown apart by Michael Connor in an article titled "Error Nullius", published in the Bulletin on August 26, 2003. Attwood either learned the nature of Reynolds' fiction from Connor's article, or was prompted by it to pre-empt its repercussions. Either way he rode a wave generated by Connor's seismic revelations--not that readers of Attwood's article would learn that from his one supercilious reference to Connor in a footnote.

Two weeks after Attwood's Financial Review article was published, Christopher Pearson devoted his Weekend Australian column to Attwood's attack on Reynolds, arguing that it signalled a "paradigm shift in Australian historiography". In response, Attwood wrote a letter to the editor insisting that he:

    did not argue Henry Reynolds' 1987 book The Law  of the Land influenced the legal reasoning of the  

      
  High Court's Mabo decision. Instead, I contended    Reynolds  contributed a new moral narrative called    terra nullius that gave the  court a way of explaining    its 200-year denial of Aboriginal land  rights. 

A tense quiet fell on the new humanities front, until December 3, 2005, when Pearson reviewed Michael Connor's new book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, and noted that Attwood had backed away from his criticism of Reynolds. Attwood wrote another letter, insisting that he had not backed away from his criticism of "Reynolds' politically charged approach in The Law of the Land". Debates flared in unlikely places; the entangled strands of terra nullius were unwound, rewound, separated and tangled again into knots. Immigrants from Europe and Asia, who are used to complicated histories that stretch back millennia, must have wondered how so much confusion could arise from events that occurred within the last three centuries.